CHAPTER FIFTY

BLACK HEART

QUINN TAYLOR:

I sat smiling to myself as I knocked back straight whiskies at my favourite bar in the middle of the city. Vancouver had many bars, but this dark and dingy one was my favourite. It had an intensely brooding atmosphere and I always felt pumped up on adrenaline when I first came in. Until the alcohol numbed my brain and senses. Until the whisky made my heart ache less. Katherine Constantine. I wish I'd never laid eyes on her. Since the day I met her I had been under her spell. I had gone to the kindergarten where she worked to pick up my nephew one day last spring. My sister had been sick with the flu and couldn't go herself. I grudgingly said I would do it as I normally work the graveyard shift as a security guard for a large pharmaceutical company. This week I was on annual Spring leave.

I don't like children. They are extremely annoying, snotty and clingy. My nephew was four years old and I had nothing to say to him. The one and only day I picked him up was the day I saw this blonde haired vision walking towards me with a beautific smile and the bluest of blue eyes. Instantly I turned my scowl of annoyance at having to pick up the brat into a dazzling smile of wonderment. Kat had smiled and nodded to me, "Hello. I'm Katherine Constantine, Joshua's teacher. You must be Quinn? Sarah phoned to say she was sick and that you would be picking her son up today" she had said in a perfect soft voice of an angel. I had nodded, dumbstruck for a second by her beauty. "Yes, I'm Quinn" I had replied when I had composed myself. God, she was stunning. I had to have her. Could I ask her for a date here and now? What were the rules? I didn't like rules, so I had decided just to come out with it.

Josh had annoyingly tried to hold my hand. I had let him just this once because I didn't want Kat to think I was a heartless monster. Truth is, I don't even think I have a heart. Or if I do, it's black and empty. And dead inside. Until that day. My heart had stuttered and beat wildly as soon as I saw her face. I had ignored my nephew's sticky hand in mine as I had asked the beautiful Kat if she would mind accompanying me to see a film that night. She had looked stunned at first but then she had smiled as she accepted my offer. That night, in the dark of the cinema, I took her hand and I knew there and then that my life was never going to be the same again. Somehow this girl had gotten to me, she had broken down barriers I had been carefully building since I was a kid. I was born two months premature. I was small and scrawny as a child. I was bullied at school. I was called names, like stick insect and other hurtful jibes. I didn't have any friends at all. Sarah, my older sister was my only light in the darkness. Mother and Father died when we were small in a fatal car accident. We were sent to live with our much older aunt Betty Ann, who had never had children of her own. She wasn't really interested in us, she carried out the basics but nothing else. I learned in high school it was time to toughen up or forever be the victim. I started training every day in the gym when I was fifteen. By the time I turned seventeen I was tall, muscular and strong. No one messed with me any more. No one bothered with me either, I had only made friends with dumb bells and machines, no real people were allowed in my life. That was the best way. Sarah had turned out just fine, she was popular and outgoing. She tried to help me at first but soon got tired of my refusal to take part in society. She went to university when she was seventeen to study Chemistry and Maths. She was the clever one of the family. She met a boy in her first year there, in her second year she had fallen pregnant with Josh. She dropped out of Uni. The boy Harry, became her husband a year later. She is happy being a mother and wife. How dull. I rarely see her.

I had thanked my sister silently a million times for being ill that particular day though. The day I met my Kat was the best day of my life. Before that I drifted through my life. I got up at midday every day. I showered, I ate a simple meal, I trained down the gym for four hours solid. I showered again at home, I watched one of my favourite war films or I surfed the net aimlessly. Then I made two ham and cheese sandwiches for my break at work. I often took an apple as well. I walked the short distance to work at nine pm. I spent my night looking at camera screens and patrolling the buildings. At six am exactly I clocked out and walked home in the early morning light. My life was simple until Kat came into it. After that I obsessed over her constantly. Where was she? What was she doing? Who was she with? I expected her to have the same feelings I was experiencing, but although she enjoyed my company now and again she simply wasn't in love with me in the slightest. I think she liked having a big strong handsome guy to show off when she needed a date. Apart from that I was nothing to her. She didn't even call me her boyfriend. We kissed a lot but nothing more. When I kissed her I felt a deep longing desire well up within me. I needed her. I wanted her, but she didn't feel the same way. Every time I tried to take our relationship further she pushed me away. Every time I tried to see her more often or suggest we do stuff together as a couple, she became more and more distant. She sat me down and explained she wasn't looking for a relationship at this point in her life. She said she liked me a lot, but only as a casual dating arrangement. I nodded and agreed with a smile whilst a fiery rage of unrequited love burned inside me. The more she ignored me, the more I burned. I burned with anger, I burned with love and desire. Sometimes I burned with hatred for her too. At some point I believed my heart had turned black because it could not burn any more. She stopped calling me, I only spoke to her if I made the first move. I began following her, recording her every move in secret. I had to be near her, had to have her in my life. Stalking seemed a reasonable way to go about it.

The last time we met up she told me she was taking some time off work, but she wouldn't tell me why. I only found out when she randomly phoned me a few weeks ago. That's when she told me about him. Embry freaking Call. She felt like she should tell me she had met someone. So much for not wanting a relationship. It was me she hadn't wanted all along. I had pretended to be friendly and courteous on the phone to her, all the while my knuckles turning white as I had gripped the phone with madness and rage. Yes, this girl had driven me crazy. Crazy enough to go look for her. I needed my daily fix of stalking her. I needed to see her and the thousands of pictures I had taken in secret were not doing it for me any more. She had innocently let it slip that she was staying near Port Angeles. I had gone there looking for her when I had seen Rebecca, her half sister. I hated Rebecca Call. She looked at me suspiciously with those dark cold eyes whenever she saw me. She annoyed me so badly. Why wasn't she proud to have Kat's family name? Why did she insist on calling herself Rebecca Call after the mother who abandoned her? In Port Angeles she was her usual prickly stuck up self. Her pathetic excuse for a real mother had tried to stand up for her son and Rebecca's half brother, Embry, In my eyes he had taken Kat from me and that knowledge did not rest easy with me. Rebecca needed to be taught a lesson.

I smiled to myself again over another whisky as I pictured her face tonight as she got home from her trip. I should have stayed hidden away to watch and hear her reaction, but I knew it was better to be careful. Kat had unwittingly shown me where the spare key for Rebecca's apartment was kept one night. I had thought she would mine that night. I was excited to be alone with her, but when she told me I would be sleeping on the sofa bed because she didn't want to be alone whilst flat sitting, I felt the rage burn through my chest again. She had led me on for months, she had kissed me and held her body close to me, she had made me believe something was happening between us. I took an angry swig of the neat whisky, barely grimacing as it's flaming heat hit the back of my throat. Kat needed taught a lesson too and I had a seed of evil planted in my mind that was slowly growing into a fine idea of revenge. Gone were the days when Quinn Taylor was a weak snivelling wreck, bullied and jeered at by others. No, now I was strong and I was not going to let anyone make a fool of me.

Not now, not ever.